Day 36: Blood on the Court

In eighth grade, I participated in a grade school volleyball match at the community gym called Roosevelt Center. During a time out, when our coach finished her words, we all put our hands together to say 1,2,3 Let's go! My hand came out with a little gash on the back of my left hand below the thumb from someone's very long fingernail. I was up next to serve and I made a fist and lobbed the underhand serve. The leather ball got a good bit of blood on it, it was a few serves before I noticed I was bleeding. I was really embarrassed when I realized my blood all over the game ball. I still have a scar on my hand there, so that must be why I remember that game so clearly.

In one of the NCAA college tournament games on Saturday night, the tv announcers were mildly alarmed because one of the basketball players had some blood flowing from his arm and neither the refs nor any of the players were noticing. Finally a player from the opposite team held up the guy's arm to show him. He was escorted to the sidelines where there were medical trainers with rubber gloves that could to tend to him and bandage him up.

The CPR refresher class Jeff and I took last month included a segment of training called Universal Precautions, which is all about protecting one's self in a occupational or first-aid situation where someone's skin has been broken and blood is flowing. Rubber gloves, masks, goggles and sharps containers might all be required to protect first-aid helpers, co-workers, and garbage collectors from the contamination of disease that can be passed on through blood or other bodily fluids.

As a teenager I worked Chicago Farmers Markets, and one Saturday morning at the Lincoln Park Farmer's Market near Halsted and Armitage, the fire department came out and cordoned off a section of the parking lot where a man had tripped and fallen and bled on the parking lot. The rumor was going around among the marketers and farm workers that the person who had injured himself had AIDS, and since there were lots of kids and dogs running around close to the ground, that must be why the yellow tape was put up on a 6 foot perimeter around the site of the blood. I remember wondering if the guy was embarrassed that his bloodshed was being treated as seriously as a hazardous material spill situation.

There is a lot of talk in Leviticus, and consequently in other parts of the Bible, that caution people to "get off the court" until they stop bleeding. People with open wounds, chronic skin irritations, bodily discharges, women who were menstruating or post-partum, were labeled ceremoniously unclean, defiled, or impure, whichever English word is in a particular Bible translation. They had to undergo some time away from the rest of the people, some special cleansing rituals, and be pronounced clean by the priest before they could get back in the game of community life. If they were not careful, someone elso might come in contact with them, and then that person too, just by touch, would remain unclean too till sunset.

It is mysterious to me that in Leviticus, blood of dead animals is sprinkled on clothes and on altars and on priests to cleanse or purify them, but blood flowing from a healthy or wounded human or animal defiles whatever it touches. Is it a matter of Universal Precautions and Public Health, or is there another principal that the people are supposed to be learning?

Warning: "A Desperate Housewife's Bloody Lenten Devotional" is an informal collection of personal experiences and perspectives of a housewife, intended primarily for enjoyment by other women who regularly stand by a laundry tub scrubbing stains. No facts were double-checked, and the opinions presented may not be representative of those held by the established Christian church. Since this housewife is known to have deficiences in the following skills: submitting to religious authority figures, keeping the realms of fact and fantasy separate, and maintaining exemplary mental health, it is important to consult with your local credentialed male church official for the most accurate, time-tested views on the Bible and reality.